"Lack of whisky, I should think," Maxim said lightly.
George was silent for a time. Then he said: "Yes. But not just wanting it: feeling how much I needed it. It worried me."
Realising George was serious, Maxim tried to think of something helpful. "You were under a lot of stress. I've never been a prisoner, unarmed, helpless-except in exercise situations. And you can't really fake the real thing."
"Thank you, Harry. But it wasn't that…"
"Did they try interrogating you?"
"The one did. He asked how I'd found the house, who else knew, he said nobody would find me there in that place… I don't think he was very serious, though. And he didn't stay very long."
"Probably wanted to nip upstairs and check the place wasn't full of coppers, if he was on his own by then."
"Yes… it all seems a bit unreal and tame, now. Isuppose they really weren't going to kill me. I mean, that isn't the way they seem to work. I told myself that, in the dark, but I wasn't very convincing." He looked around at the wide green downs, the tattered grey sky and out to the Channel, where a broad blade of sunlight broke through to glitter the surface: " 'Set in the silver sea"… he must have been looking south when he wrote that. There's a helicopter."
Maxim had heard it already, its pulsing carried on the wind as it tracked the line of the cliff edge. "Somebody's reported the Land-Rover."
"We'd better keep moving."
"Better if we watched. We're just taking a stroll. You'd stop and watch a helicopter rescue act, wouldn't you?"
They stood there-luckily too far from the cliff for it to be natural for them to hurry down and peer over-as the helicopter swung into the wind and began hovering.
"I didn't know you were coming back," George remembered suddenly.
"It was a bit hurried. Things happened out in Illinois…" He told George briefly. The helicopter wavered itself into position, the winchman standing in the open doorway, then sank gradually below the cliff edge.
They walked on towards the road. "So it's finally got into the open," George said. "Well, not the open, with the broad bottoms of the Security Service planted on it, but the whole thing, back to the Abbey and the Reznichenko Memorandum and Tatham himself in 1968… Harry, when we add our experience here today, you know I think we've won? There isn't a committee in Whitehall that can whitewash this lot away. "
"If that matters any longer."
"What do you mean by that?"
"They could have done more to cover themselves. Pushed you over a cliff in your own car, driven you away somewhere, anything to give themselves more time… I don't think they want much more time. They think they've got enough."
"They can't do anything now without it being obvious it's part of the pattern."
"But do they know that?"
37
George phoned Annette, then the DDCR, from a telephone box in the little village just before Eastbourne, while Maxim sat in the car sorting the dead man's belongings and guessing how long it would take to establish that he had bullet wounds as well as the other problems of being dead. But just empty pockets would be suspicious enough.
"Charles Henderson," he told George, when he got back. "Address in Bath. He's got credit cards, too, so it's probably genuine. He wasn't on the CCOAC list, as I remember." He started the car, then slipped a cassette into the player. After a moment, it launched into a rock number.
He turned down the volume. George glared: "Harry, I didn't think even you liked this syncopated rubbish."
"It's pretty much unsyncopated, really. Almost everything on the beat. Mr Henderson had it in his pocket."
They listened to five minutes of it, George hunched and miserable. Abruptly, it became a sequence of bleeps, then a gabble of electronic noise. With one pause, it lasted about a minute. The rock music started again in mid-track.
Maxim wound the tape back and listened again.
"For all I know," George said, "that could be number one on the Hit Parade."
"I think it's more likely to be a computer program."
"Do they use those things in computers?"
"Normal thing, for the household computer. The trouble is, we don't know what brand of computer. "
"They're different?"
"Yes."
"Do you mean these blasted things are supposed to be revolutionising the world and they don't even speak the same language? How d'you know about computers, anyway?"
"I'd like to say it's because I belong to the computerised Army. In fact, it's because Chris has gone crazy about them. I'm going to have to buy him one for Christmas."
Mollified by Maxim's ignorance, George said: "Well, if he knows more about it than you do, why don't we ask him what brand it is? Your parents don't live far from here, do they?"
Crawling around Brighton and through Worthing stretched the thirty-mile journey to over an hour, and it was almost dark when they had picked Chris up from his school and reached the centre of Littlehampton. Or not quite, because it was one of those small towns which had closed off its centre to make a pedestrian precinct; Maxim parked as close as he could, but on a yellow line. Chris's eleven-year-old morality made him draw in his breath with solemn disapproval.
"I know," Maxim said, "but I've been mixing with some corrupting influences. Anyway, Mr Harbinger will pay if we get nicked."
Chris led them straight to a small home-computer shop, and Maxim realised how many Saturday mornings the boy must have spent with his nose pressed to the window. The proprietor, small and elderly, greeted them warmly. Two men-one expensively dressed-with a boy seemed a certain sale.
Maxim held out the cassette. "There's a program on this. Can you tell us what computer it's written for?"
The proprietor's smile faded.
George said: "If you've got the one it fits, I'll buy it."
"No, I will," Maxim corrected.
The proprietor didn't care who won that argument. Chris, however, cared very much. He stood very still, his golden-brown eyes following the discussion, and only reluctantly switching away to watch the proprietor run the cassette into one machine after another.
"I've been meaning to get one for months," George insisted.
"You? You need an instruction book with a pair of scissors."
"I have two daughters," George said with dignity.
"And I intend to see them raised properly on the principles of Kinder, Kücheand computing. "
"I promised Chris-"
"Daddy." Chris touched his arm: the screen had flashed up a sequence of incomprehensible instructions and the proprietor was beaming.
"Is that all we get?" George demanded.
"No, sir," Chris assured him. "That's just the listing. You have to run it."
"We'll do that at home," Maxim said quickly. "You can make it work?"
The proprietor said: "From the look of the program, you'll need an interface and a joystick as well, sir. I would recommend…"
One way and another, the price had doubled by the time they got out of the shop, and Maxim let George pay it. In the car, he asked the disappointed Chris: "Is this the model you'd have chosen for yourself?"
"Well… there's nothingwrong with it… I think I would have preferred…"He just hated to see any computer slip away from his grasp, and he was grasping the keyboard of this one very tightly on his knees.
"You can hang on to that until my daughters get back from school," George assured him.
Once inside Maxim's parents' house, they worked as a team. Maxim hauled his father and mother away from the TV to introduce George, whilst Chris started linking the keyboard, transformer, interface, joystick and cassette recorder to the TV screen in a tangle of wires and plugs recruited from all over the house.